CONVERSATIONS IN WARSAW
275
intellectuals in Western countries had recently become intensely
interested
in
the revisionists, reprinting their essays and seeking
them out when coming to Poland, but that the Social Democrats,
who had first voiced the criticisms of the regime that the revision–
ists had later adopted-who had, in fact, been attacked by the re–
visionists when the latter were serving the regime--were generally
ignored or unknown. Q. mentioned several essays, analyzing the
nature of bureaucracy, that he and his friends had written before
October, and that had circulated clandestinely. This same group
had also circulated translations of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and
other sociological writers whose works had been banned during the
Stalinist period. Q. knew the philosophical leader of the revisionists,
and liked him, but felt that Western attention concentrated too
much on this man-to his own detriment-and thus distorted the
nature of the intellectual ferment that had contributed to October.
After dinner, I met several of Q.'s friends and, with several
bottles of vodka, we settled down to a long evening of talk, drink
and song. They sang Polish workers' songs, and I responded with
some old Wobbly tunes and some of the classic radical parodies like
"The Lady with the Popular Front." One new joke was added to
my fund of Polish
~tories:
In World War III, Poland will be in the
most favored position of any country in the world. Why? Well,
what other country has such a large buffer state between itself and
China? The evening lasted, with the vodka, until dawn.
The most memorable evening of my stay in Warsaw was an
encounter with a Marxist philosopher who I shall call Urban.
Urban occupied a curious position in the debates that had taken
place in Poland. He was against the revisionists, and many con–
sidered
him
"orthodox," yet he was anti-Stalinist. I had been in
correspondence with him as a result of a paper I had published in
the
Journal of Philosophy
in November 1959, entitled "The "Re–
discovery' of Alienation: The Quest for the Historical Marx."
In the paper I had argued that the current preoccupation with
the theme of alienation in Marx was both historically false to Marx
and a poor crutch to use in debate against the "orthodox" spokes–
men for Marxism. My argument was, first, that Marx had repudi–
ated his earlier concern with "self' and with "moral imperatives,"
and
in
doing so had actually closed off some fruitful roads of in-
